My fan comment was a joke about Slack's efficiency. Of course compiling a bunch of go code will make the fan turn on. That will use up 100% of your cores on any decent sized project.
My idle times, browsing something like HN, or sitting in #emacs I get near 20 hours on my t450s and about 13 on my x220.
I think low low low idle power consumption is key to long infrequent charges. This is because the second you are not using your computer then it should also not be using power. For example, my t450s without adjusting the screen bigness idles at 2.8W, so tons of idle time with a 97WH battery.
You can't really optimize power for when you are using it. If you are compiling, you want the fastest compile time and use the most power. Same for other things that take power.
I go all weekend not charging my personal laptop and the only times I close the lid is when I am going to bed. Otherwise I leave the lid open, same brightness and walk away for hours and come back and continue where I left off.
So I see your point about people saying "I get 9 hours of battery life." doing nothing, but even 9 hours of doing nothing is fairly low, given I can make a 10 year old laptop get close to 18 hours, and a 4 year old one get near 21 hours "doing nothing".
Would you mind sharing what setup you have that lets you get such long battery life?
But get power top installed. Make sure in the 4th screen in power top and make sure all settings are to "good". I made a systemd unit to do this for me know boot. I also installed tlp and have it set it's settings. Some of those cross over into what powertop does.
I set some things on the i915 driver but that will have to wait until baby watch is over.
Does it for me.
The T450s generation (and the generation before it) use ULV processors (ultra low voltage).
The processors used in the T450s generation have a TLP of 15W.
The processors used in the X220 generation have a TLP of 35W.
On the flip side, the processors in the X220 generation (and in the next generation) are powerful, which is a good thing if you need the power and if you have the laptop plugged most of the time.
Modern T-series still have amazing damn battery life, and I’ve never found anyone else who comes close except Apple, or Android ARM hybrids like the old ASUS Transformer Prime with the double batteries.
I wish to purchase a new battery for it and am looking for a place to buy a battery that
1. will ship to Norway without too high shipping cost, and
2. isn’t going to explode in my face.
Any suggestions?
Also, mbrumlow, what distro are you running? And did you customize it in anyway aside from using powertop that you mentioned, to get it to consume low amounts of power while idle?
You should be able to optimize and get even higher. I'm actually considering getting a new T480 (since it has the battery expanded slot), but I'm struggling to decide.
Long live the ThinkPad.
Edit: This is with mostly casual use on an Arch Linux setup.
I think the next killer feature I want/look for in a laptop is the ability to see the screen in bright sunlight. It's a gorgeous day today and I would mind spending a few hours by the waterfront coding.
This year's models are doing away with replaceable batteries for the most part. T490 has a built-in 50 Whr battery and no ability to extend or replace that without removing screws. It also gets rid of the 2.5 in drive option, one of the RAM slots (but it adds a soldered one), and it replaces the full size SD with a micro-SD. All of that for a small reduction in weight and thickness.
So, basically, the thinkpad line is gone now, it's just another poor macbook pro knockoff. I expect to see articles like this one for years to come, given that there are almost no options left if you want power, expandability and battery life in a single laptop package.
I do this with an OLPC XO. I also have a Cr-48 with Lubuntu. There's a tradeoff: the XO has a brighter screen but a smaller keyboard.
But it wasn't a billion-dollar opportunity and Pixel Qi are so forgotten they were reported by the media as closed down, although might technically still exist (and might have released their IP to the public, I haven't read too far on it just now).
I think a lot of this might be attributable to just how well power-optimised safari is. I could get 10 hours using safari when my macbook was new, but only 6 using chrome or firefox! Given that safari is speed-competitive with these browsers, it's very impressive.
I've noticed the i7-8550U in my HP Envy can easily drive consumption up to 22W during a parallel compile even though I spend most of my time idling between 5 and 7W while editing text. The extra cores seem to consume a lot of power compared to my older 5th-gen laptop with 2 physical cores.
I also wonder if mobile Ryzen behaves similarly or if Intel just trashed their power/thermals in order to compete on core count.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to find benchmarks with power vs load stats. Most of them seem to be like "7 hours watching a movie in Windows" when I'd rather see "Battery is 55 Wh but computer uses 22W when all cores are 100% and 35W at 100% CPU and GPU". You know, like actual facts about the hardware rather than subjective usage experiences.
This afternoon I upgraded my kernel from 4.15 to 4.18. Then I removed the r8168 module that I'd tried to use to reduce power consumption. Using the open source r8169 module got me PC7 states. Now my X210 idles at 5 watts. I'm guessing I could go lower if I tweaked more, but this is a huge improvement in battery life. I'm glad I took the time to look into it.
I've gotten battery consumption figures as high as 30 watts when running something like `./minerd --benchmark --threads=8`. Intel claims the i7-8550U has a 15W TDP, but it can easily go above that if it has enough cooling.
It's less of a joke and probably just a statement.
Seriously: even something as small as someone adding an animated emoji makes slack eat CPU :-/
(I believe that the 13% CPU nentioned there is a rounded-up 12.5% of the whole CPU, or in other words a full 100% of one of 8 hyperthreads.)
Brian Kernighan's COS333 page links to a goodui.org that recommends animations (in moderation) but also a bunch of horrible stuff.
So there's that.
Yesterday I saw someone here on HN saying they didn't know (something about Windows) because they never used Windows.
Performance is not on the list and probably never will be.
>They have raised so much money and have so many engineers.
> My fan comment was a joke about Slack's efficiency.
Hence the "lol" ;)
I'm impressed; with Xcode and the simulator I'm lucky to get anything longer than 6 hours…
I got the figures from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specific... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specific...
Yeah, but try standing in their shoes: they too are probably wondering how you can bear getting worked up over such small things such as fans going off.
It admittedly sounds like a worse situation to be in (seeing that it means living one's whole life in constant irritation) than to have noisy fans.
Fans spinning up is an indicator of something. Usually an indicator that the machine is under heavy load and you need to watch out for the things that come with machines under heavy load: slower performance, overheating, graphical artifacts, potential crashing, etc.
If my fans spun up when I was not aware my computer was under heavy load, I would believe something was wrong with my computer. If I spent any amount of time researching why my computer was under heavy load and my conclusion was that it was not under heavy load and that the fans just spun up for no reason, I think I'd be rightfully irritated.
Imagine a doorbell that rings randomly even if no one is at the door. In the grand scheme of things it's minor. But it shouldn't be happening, and every time it does I have to get up and walk to the window to see if someone is actually there. Every time the doorbell rings and no one is there, I'm going to get more and more irritated.
I'm not an expert in CPU thermals by any means, but from what I've gathered, in order to eek out a tenth of a gigahertz for their marketing materials (with rapidly diminishing returns because physics), manufacturers usually set Turbo Boost Power Limits 5-10 (or more) watts too high. Since Turbo Boost usually maximizes a single core's frequency and the heat generated increases exponentially, it creates a very concentrated heat spike in the silicon. Even if the CPU heat sink is good enough to passively dissipate that much heat from all of the cores, the turbo boost hot spot forces the fans to spin up early before the CPU knows how long the boost will be needed (otherwise Turbo boost would significantly reduce the lifetime of the CPU). Combined with random scheduled OS tasks that take a split second of turbo to run a process and firmware configured with a minimum fan running time to avoid even more annoying pulsing, these power limits cause many mass market laptops to needlessly spin up their fans all the time.
It's ridiculous but I've been running ThrottleStop/the equivalent on Linux to under-clock every laptop I've owned since Turbo Boost was introduced. A small 10-20% reduction in turbo boost power limits is rarely noticeable unless you have a very specialized and irregular CPU-bound workload but it makes a significant change in the amount of heat it generates and gives the passive dissipation enough time to absorb a boosted workload instead of spinning up the fans in an emergency.
The general advice is to never ever leave the factory configuration in place (if you're not going to install Linux at least reinstall windows)
Hardware manufactures are, in general, not your friends.
What if the "no discernible reason" is just poorly coded software?
The stock firmware is, uh, not good. I ported Coreboot to the second batch boards (https://github.com/mjg59/coreboot/tree/X210_good ) and things improved significantly - I wrote it up at https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/50924.html
Spotify, Slack, and Discord are major culprits, like if someone posts a single gif (are they animated manually by React?). But even some recipe website on a browser tab might go into 100% CPU usage because part of its ad-serving kit was blocked by ublock.
I consider it (or any app like it) essential for maxing your battery lifespan. Really wish it was built into macOS.
What's nice about having a global CPU graph is that you get used to normal idling levels and will start to notice anomalies.
You're also just closer to the pulse of your computer. What exactly are normal bandwidth consumption levels over the course of a day? What speeds are you normally getting? Which apps and which actions seem to be the hardest on your resources? I think these are just nice things to know about the device you use every day like how you might get used to the sounds and feel of the car you drive every day.
For example, I often see HNers suggest that a good computer confers no benefits for web browsing. Meanwhile, I can say that web browsing is the most resource intensive thing going on in my computer. What your CPU graph as you click around the internet. Or when decoding a high res Youtube video or a muted autoplaying video on some news article. Or scrolling Facebook/Instagram.
I have an older machine that stutters while playing 720p+ Youtube videos unless the CPU is idle, and busier webpages take much longer to render and lock up the UI before I can click around. A better computer can save an impressive amount of time in the long run. It's not for nothing!
MacOS always tracks the energy usage stats so you don't have to keep activity monitor open, just look at the 'Average Energy Impact' column. iStats menu also uses a fair bit of CPU, similar to Activity Monitor, it's just split into a couple processes so it doesn't show as much, not that this is a reason not to use it, I love it and use it daily, it's not a good contrast point with the activity monitor.
Good point about iStat Menus consuming its own resources. It has two processes afaict with its main process staying below 1% CPU. I bet that number sees an increase once you start turning on more HUDs like the temp/fan sensors and jacking up the update frequency though.
If you want to know 'what is using all by battery' after a couple hours using it, you want to know the average power usage by app, which activity monitor gives you. Battery life is the point of this thread, not random lock ups.
> Good point about iStat Menus consuming its own resources. It has two processes afaict with its main process staying below 1% CPU.
I wish we could just get rid of 'cpu %' as a metric on modern machines, or at least scale it based on P-state. Saying process X is taking Y% of the CPU is pointless if you don't also communicate the P-state, and chances are you don't even know which core the process is running. Point is, I'm sitting here almost completely idle and there are plenty of tasks 'using 3-5% of my CPU', of course the CPU is running at 800MHz no where near it's all core peak of 2.7Ghz, much less it's single core peak of 4.5Ghz. What does 1% CPU even mean in this world?
I run Activity Monitor 24/7; it's actually not that bad, especially if it's not visible.
I also got the first Macbook 12" and I would get better battery life running Windows 10 than I would OSX. Windows 10 I would get ~12 hours or so. Windows 10 on the Macbook Pro drained the battery quickly though because you couldn't switch to integrated graphics.
Most MacBooks doesn’t turn their fans on until the aluminum bottom is tenderizing your lap (and/or melting the table). You could configure this on most non-Apple laptops, too, but running the fans earlier keeps temps down and probably extends the hardware lifetime.
If a modern 13.3 screamer with battery life is what you are looking for however, check out the just released Thinkpad x390. It's even more modern and the battery life is a staggering 17-18 hours.
What is hard however, is getting long life out of a performance laptop with a 45-60W CPU when you're capped to a 100Whr battery.
FWIW it runs OpenBSD and is currently at 52C.. When doing a heavy compile or something it can get up to about 80. Mounted to the back of a monitor, can't even see it.
10/10 would recommend.
That's probably a fake or aged battery, or your power management is set up incorrectly. A X62 with a fresh battery lasts a lot longer than 2 hours.
My more recent Macbook pro at work is basically worst though, not sure why.
As for Windows 10, it's in its own class of terrible design - try as they might, the Linux folks are nowhere close to matching it.
I have to bear with my laptop's loud fan, but I would like to replace it with a fanless one in the future.
Carbon series form factor...3 hours at a time.
At a place I used to work, laptops were routinely getting bricked by the anti-virus software. Basically it would run a scan, the laptop would overheat and die.
At some point, it seems like the "cure" can be more dangerous than what it's designed to fix.
> Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.
On the next line he says that with a newish kernel he can get 6 hours with the flush battery. That is not bad at all.
> Update (2017-03-17): I managed to get PC7 idle by upgrading my kernel to 4.18 and replacing the r8168 module with r8169. Battery life has increased significantly. I now get 6 hours with the flush battery and 10 hours with the extended battery.
I know nothing will be very significant, but I wish at least my laptop can stay for the whole day on battery.
Now when my fans spin up, I just blame McAfee.
I got a Thinkpad E485 ( wanted to try AMD Ryzen mobile) and with Ubuntu installed, I get about 2.5-3 hours on the battery, which is... I forget now. I think it's 48Wh.
You really should be able to cover a full day’s work on 80Wh.
Not going to lie, that’s pretty horrible.
> Battery life would increase by 50% if I got PC6 or PC8 idle states. The fan only turns on if I’m doing something intensive like compiling go or scrolling in Slack.
lol. One of the things that really drives me nuts is my computer’s fan turning on when I know really shouldn’t be. I have lived and worked with people for whom having their fan randomly turn on for no reason is completely normal, and I just can’t understand how they can bear it. If this happens to me, you can bet I’m digging through Activity Monitor and killing the culprit before the fans can get fully ramped up.